This project takes a new approach to the treatment of Catholicism in Finnegans Wake, by looking
beyond established theological and philosophical readings in order to focus on the intricacies of Joyce's
engagement with Irish Catholic culture, c. 1850•1 939. This period accounts for the years of Cardinal
Cullen's 'devotional revolution' in Ireland, for the formation of-the deeply conservative and Rome-centred
religious culture into which Joyce was born, and for the emergence of a new Irish Catholic
state following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. As my tide suggests, this thesis highlights Joyce's
critique of the Church. Adopting a historicist methodology, and drawing upon extensive archival
research, I consider how Joyce's sources-both textual and cultural-are transformed through his
revolutionary aesthetic into a radical dismantling of Irish Catholic society.
Topics considered include the following: the role of the artist-intellectual in the 'new' Ireland,
as shown through the portrait of Shem the Penman; the nature and reach of Joyce's devastating
anticlerical satire of Shaun; the difficulties faced by unmarried Irish Catholic girls, as embodied by
Issy, and the impact of ALP's concerted attack on the material culture of Irish Catholicism, an act that
is performed in defence of her husband. The final section of this thesis rums LO the historical
complexities of Book IV. It attempts to articulate how ALP's closing monologue can be understood
against the backdrop of a new dawn of conservative Irish Catholicism, and in relation to the decline of
the Anglicized patriarch HCE.